Campaigning In Georgia, Vaccinations In Gaza, Judicial Reform in Mexico

0:04A high-profile feud gets pushed aside as the political map keeps shifting. Leading both parties to believe they can pull Georgia onto their side of the electoral ledger. I'm Scott Simon. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is Up First from NPR News. Donald Trump narrowly lost Georgia four years ago and blamed that in part on Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Now the two are campaigning together. We'll take you to Georgia for details. And then to Mexico, where voters may soon be able to elect judges. Why experts urge caution today on the podcast. And polio reappears in Gaza. But there's reason to hope. So please stay with us.

0:46We have the news you need to start your weekend. This message comes from NPR sponsor Walmart. Did you know that Walmart is one of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for in 2025? It's no surprise. Walmart is investing$1 billion in training and development to help associates build lasting careers with or without a degree. In fact, 75 % of Walmart management started in hourly roles. With benefits like health care, paid parental leave, and tuition support, Walmart isn't just a place to work. It's a place to grow. Learn more at walmart.com slash spark. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, took a bus tour this week through coastal Georgia, which the Democratic Party sees as a crucial battleground in the race to win the White House.

1:42But Republican infighting has plagued the party since Trump's narrow loss there in 2020. NPR's Stephen Fowler is our man in Georgia. He joins us now. Stephen, thanks so much for being with us. Always a pleasure. Donald Trump won Georgia decisively in 2016, lost by under 12 ,000 votes in 2020. How would he win there this November? Well, getting more votes than Kamala Harris. But on a more serious note, here's a quick Georgia history lesson for you. For more than two decades, Republicans have dominated Georgia's politics at every level. They've enacted pro-business policies that have attracted tons of new residents and industries and voters that don't usually vote for Republicans.

2:25Things like the film industry, the tech industry. So as Georgia has purpled, Scott, Republicans have been successful in recent years by minimizing culture war issues and appealing to more than just their conservative base. That's the type of message Trump needs to convey, but he's done the opposite of that. In fact, he spent most of the last four years attacking popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp for not overturning the 2020 election. Case in point, here's Trump at an Atlanta rally earlier this month. He's a bad guy, he's a disloyal guy, and he's a very average governor. Little Brian, little Brian Kemp.

3:02Bad guy. But they've made up, right? Well, yes. I mean, there's a few things that happened, namely Kamala Harris happened, and the new Democratic enthusiasm has made Georgia a competitive state once more, there's been lots of behind-the-scenes wrangling, culminating in Kemp doing an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity that made its way in front of Donald Trump. I've been saying consistently for a long time we cannot afford another four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and I think Kamala Harris and Tim Walsh would be even worse. Kemp went on to say it's imperative that Trump gets back into the White House and that the Republican Party keeps the House and flips the Senate.

3:41Republicans in Georgia know the stakes especially well, Scott. The 2020 election also saw runoffs that flipped both Senate seats to Democrats. And while Kemp romped in the midterms, a Trumpy Senate candidate lost in a runoff to Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, once again cementing Democratic control of the chamber because of Georgia. I mean, Scott, Georgia is truly a state that is split both demographically and ideologically along a knife's edge and shows it has an electorate that's willing to vote for a Republican in Brian Kemp and a Democrat in Raphael Warnock. What is the Trump campaign plan?

4:18Can you tell? Well, they have this Trump Force 47 strategy and Georgia's kind of ground zero for that. It uses volunteers at the local level to activate friends and neighbors with targeted messaging and reminding them to get out the vote. This is especially important after some of those people stayed home in previous elections because of Trump's false fraud claims. The campaign says they've held hundreds of events and signed up thousands of volunteers in just the last few weeks. And Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump's VP pick, was just campaigning in Georgia, showing that there's an army of surrogates both inside and outside the state that can more effectively reach beyond the base and expand that tent.

4:59Ultimately, Republicans hope the specter of four more years of Democratic policies is also enough of a motivator for people to show up and vote. And Pierre Stephen Fowler in Atlanta, thanks so much. Thank you.

5:17There's polio now in the Gaza Strip after decades of absence, but there may soon be good news. Beginning tomorrow, the United Nations will start vaccinating children in Gaza against the preventable and highly contagious virus. It will be an enormous effort that NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawi will follow from her base in Dubai. She joins us now. Aya, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Scott. Tell us about how this vaccination campaign is being rolled out. Well, the UN has really big aims here. They want to reach more than 640 ,000 children across Gaza to give them two courses of the polio vaccine.

5:56It will be given orally in droplets, but it needs refrigeration at every step. and pretty much Gaza has no electricity. They're just running on generators and fuel that's in short supply. Another logistical challenge here is that the whole population is displaced, and so it's not easy for them to reach UN-run clinics. But the UN groups leading this vaccination effort, which is UNICEF and the World Health Organization, they say the most critical factor is a pause in airstrikes so that the vaccines can reach all these children. Now, Israel says it's agreed to short pauses. Basically, it won't attack for about eight hours a day in specific parts of Gaza for the few days that this campaign is being rolled out, and Hamas says they'll also cooperate.

6:36How did the polio spread there in the first place? Doctors tell me this was a combination of factors. You know, you have children, Scott, that haven't had access to vaccines, but also most of Gaza's hospitals have been destroyed or closed. You also have wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants that have been bombed. So people have been drinking dirty water to survive. And we know from the Gaza Health Ministry that more than 40 ,000 people have been killed by Israeli fire in this war, but we don't have a tally for people who've died from illness. However, we know there's been a huge spike in kids with infections and diarrhea.

7:08Children are hungry. They are malnourished. They're living in these overcrowded shelters or in the open and tense and with weak immune systems. And do we know how widespread polio could now be in Gaza? Well, there's already been a case confirmed in a 10-month-old baby boy who was active and crawling, and he's now paralyzed in one leg after contracting polio. And he is the first case of polio in a quarter century in Gaza. Now, it comes after the Gaza Health Ministry and the World Health Organization. They sounded the alarm on this in July when they announced that the polio virus had been found in sewage water flowing in the streets around the tents of displaced people.

7:45And there are now at least two other suspected cases as well. Now, the symptoms for polio show in one out of every 100 to 1 ,000 people. So the doctors I spoke with say this means thousands of people in Gaza likely already have contracted polio. It is spreading, and one doctor called it a powder keg. And that powder keg would present a risk to other neighboring countries, wouldn't it? Extremely so. I mean, you know, for weeks now, you have Israel's military vaccinating its own soldiers, even if they've already been vaccinated against polio before, because polio spreads through water systems, aquifers, and in droplets in the air.

8:22And so not only could the virus spread to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, it could also reach Europe and the U.S. You know, two years ago, an unvaccinated Orthodox Jewish man in upstate New York contracted polio and the virus spread there. And the strain of that virus was traced to Jerusalem and London, where there's frequent travel back and forth. And so to try to understand more about this, I reached out to Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen. He is a pediatric professor at the University of Florida and a global health expert. There is no reason not to expect the disease to spread from Gaza to the surrounding countries, the unvaccinated communities in Israel, and from there to Europe, the UK, and the United States.

9:04And the only way of stopping the spread is by a successful, rigorous polio vaccine campaign. The only way that that can happen is if there is a pause in hostilities. So Dr. Goldhagen says, you know, the UN has succeeded in polio vaccinations in other war zones like Syria, like Yemen, Sudan. And so there is hope that the UN and the Palestinian health workers this weekend will be able to start doing this in Gaza too. And Pirzei Batrawi, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you, Scott.

9:44Lastly today, what sounds at first like a pretty good idea, giving voters a say in the courts. That's a reform underway in Mexico. It's popular and the president supports it. But it will completely remake the judicial branch and experts in Mexico and around the world say it's actually a terrible idea. And Puerza Eder Peralta joins us now from Mexico City. Eder, thanks for being with us. Hey there, Scott. This is a constitutional amendment that would allow the entire judiciary, including the Supreme Court, to be elected? That's right. I mean, and this is a big change. This is as epic a fight as it gets between the branches of governments.

10:27And just a bit of background before we get into the details of it. All of this is happening because President Andres Manuel López Obrador and his party won huge these past elections. They won the presidency, they won a super majority in Congress, and one of the things that they ran on was this judicial reform. And so now the legislative branch and the executive branch are taking on the judicial branch. One of the big changes they want to make, as you mentioned, is that federal judges of all stripes, from the Supreme Court all the way down to the district courts, would no longer be appointed. Instead, they would be directly elected by the people.

11:02President López Obrador and incoming President Claudio Sheinbaum say that this would deal with corruption in the federal courts, that this would make judges accountable to the Mexican people and not big business or special interests or organized crime. They say that this will put an end to nepotism, and that is rampant in the federal judiciary. And it is worth noting that the polls show that Mexicans, by and large, support this reform. I mean, electing all judges, democracy, to fight corruption doesn't sound like a drawback. What's the issue? I mean, on the surface, it doesn't sound like a drawback, right?

11:36But the vast majority of legal scholars and academics and intellectuals say that this isn't just a bad idea. They say it's a terrible one. The International Association of Judges, which represents judges in some 90 countries, put out an analysis of the proposed reform. And they said, please don't do this, Mexico. The US, Canada, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Human Rights Watch, they've all said this is a bad idea. I spoke to Julio Rios, who studies judiciaries at the ITAM, the Autonomous Technological Institute here in Mexico. And he says this has only been tried at the federal level in Bolivia, and it did not end corruption.

12:13Instead, it opened up the judiciary to the whims of politics. The people in government respond to a specific electoral mandate, and they are going to be held accountable in the next election based on that electoral mandate. But judges could be looking at a longer, broader horizon. They are in charge of enforcing the constitution over the laws and the governments that come and go. And what's more, he says that this reform would end career civil service in the judiciary. Right now, Mexicans have to work their way up. They have to learn the ropes in some lower level jobs before they become federal judges.

12:51And that would end with this reform. How do judges feel? They're on strike. They're not working in opposition to this reform. And the president of Mexico's Supreme Court, Norma Piña, has essentially said this is all a power struggle. She says the president of Mexico is angry that some of his big legislative proposals have been found unconstitutional. And she says that this came to a head when the federal courts in Mexico said he couldn't put the National Guard under military command. And what the court said here is that this huge security force, which the president had created and deployed across the country, had to be run under civilian control.

13:28She says once that decision was made, the president decided that the only way forward was to destroy the judiciary. But, you know, it's worth pausing on that. Some analysts I've spoken to say they don't really believe that this reform will completely destroy Mexico's judicial independence. They point out, for example, that there's still an opposition in the country and that they could very well vote for judges that could balance out the legislative and executive branches. And the vote's in a few days, right? Well, it might be in a few days. The new Congress takes power September 1st, and that's tomorrow.

13:59This piece of legislation will be its first order of business. If the ruling party has its way, they say that this should be the law of the land by latest, mid-September. And Vierge Eder Peralta, thanks so much. Thank you, Scott.

14:16And that's up first for Saturday, August 31st. I'm Aisha Roscoe. And I'm Scott Simon. Fernando Naro, Martin Patience, and Gabe O 'Connor produced today's podcast, Andrew Craig directed. Our editors were Ed Mignolte, Dee Parvez, Megan Pratz, James Heider, and Tara Neal. Anna Glovna is our technical director, with engineering support from Stacey Abbott, Arthur Laurent and Andy Huther. Evie Stone is our senior supervising editor. Sarah Lucy Oliver is our executive producer. And Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. Tomorrow on the podcast, a group of friends determined to avenge a murder. Sounds intriguing.

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